


Paralympic Origins

by hold_on_a_sex



Series: Paralympic AU [2]
Category: The Hobbit RPF
Genre: Blindness, Disability, Gen, Paralympics, Paralysis, Sports, Wheelchairs, amputations, leg length difference
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-02-26
Updated: 2014-07-09
Packaged: 2018-01-13 21:24:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1241257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hold_on_a_sex/pseuds/hold_on_a_sex
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is a prequel of sorts to Romance in Rio, my Paralympic AU. Each chapter in this story will focus on a different athlete and how they came to learn their sport and go to Rio. For those who were not born with their disability, there will be an explanation of how they became disabled, as well as how they began to compete in their sport.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Dean

**Author's Note:**

> The relationship tag is just because that relationship is in this universe; this story does not really include this relationship except in mentions, but the other stories in this series all do/will (I'm planning to do more than just this and Romance and Rio).

Life wasn’t fair. At twenty-one, Dean knew that fact well. He had been passed over for promotions at work while some jerk who never worked hard but kissed the boss’s ass got them, he had been yelled at for things that weren’t his fault, and in his second year at Rangitoto he had been wrongly accused of plagiarism and it had taken an entire month to clear his name. When he got into his car after working the closing shift at the bookstore, it was only a little past nine in the evening. The unfairness of life hit him at 72 kilometers an hour in the form of a drunk driver, crumpling Dean’s car with him inside.

The x-rays left no room for doubt; his neck was broken. It wasn’t fractured, but really, truly broken. He was exhausted and on too much pain medication to react properly when the doctors explained that paralysis started below the neck, and they would have to see how he recovered, but it didn’t look good. He instead reacted two days later, sobbing into his father’s shoulder as he lay in the hospital bed, feeling utterly broken. He had a feeding tube through his nose into his stomach, a creepy-ass neck brace made out of metal, and he couldn’t feel very much of his body anymore. In a word, he was miserable.

He hated the bright, childish balloons and doo-dads around his hospital bed, but he didn’t have the heart to tell his mother to stop bringing them. Their false cheerfulness against the stark white of the room’s walls and fixtures just reminded him of how fucking _sorry_ everyone felt for him. Hell, he felt sorry for himself, but the fact others did made it feel more serious. If he’d broken his arm, he’d feel sorry for himself, but nobody else would. Instead of visiting daily to talk softly or watch television with Dean, Jared would come in maybe once and laugh at him for his broken arm. His mother wouldn’t bring him everything from home he asked for, and would tell him to suck it up. That wasn’t the case, though; if Dean could think of any little thing that he wanted--other than food--she would bring it to him the following day, leaving him with an old quilt, a stack of books that he couldn’t read due to not being able to actually turn pages, and a rather terrible drawing that one of his little cousins had done of him.

When he was finally released from the hospital, he had some control over his arms, and a bit of feeling on his right side. He didn’t have the same range of motion that other people did, and his hands were turned permanently in--“spastic,” the doctors had called it. One hand didn’t open at all, and the other barely gripped. He had a manual wheelchair, a lightweight one with push handles, but it was slow going to move anywhere, especially since he couldn’t grip the handrims. His power chair was supposed to arrive within a fortnight, and he was looking forward to that.

He moved back into his flat, but along with him was a live-in aide named Frank. Every morning, Frank got him up, took him to the bathroom, brushed his teeth, helped him on the toilet, dressed him, and fed him breakfast. Dean would read or watch television while Frank did some work around the house, and they would go grocery shopping or to visit Dean’s mum, just to get out of the house. At lunchtime, Frank would make a sandwich and help Dean get it into his mouth in small bites, sometimes cutting it up and feeding the blonde on particularly hard days. In the evening, Frank made dinner, helped Dean shower, use the bathroom, and brush his teeth, and then put him into his pajamas and into bed. Every day felt the same. It was monotonous and empty to Dean, and all he wanted was to feel useful again, or at least active.

He was wary, however, when his mother handed him a flier she had found at church about a Paralympic track and field clinic at University of Auckland. He had seen some of that; shortly after his injury, he had watched some videos on YouTube with Jared, who had been convinced it would cheer him up. All those videos showed people with full arm strength and movement, either paraplegic or double leg amputees. There was nobody like him. He eventually succumbed to his mother’s wheedling and promised to go to the thing, but just to watch. The following Saturday, Frank helped him into sweatpants and a t-shirt and they went to the university’s track.

It felt like some sort of ridiculously dramatic moment from a movie when he saw a man like him get out of a power chair and into a three-wheeled racing chair and _go_. The man was faster than he could have ever imagined possible. He immediately dropped the idea of just watching and got into a racing chair as soon as he could, letting various assistants place his legs in the right place. His chest practically rested on his legs, but that was okay. This felt like something he could do. It didn’t matter that his hands were bent and nearly closed, because he had to punch the handrims instead of grabbing them. The first lap around the track was awkward and slow, but Dean didn’t care. This was freedom and movement and all he had wanted since that fucking accident. His second lap was a little faster, and by the end of the day, he could maneuver enough to stay in his own lane on the track and had somehow managed to join a local team that practiced four times a week.

Track, Dean would realize a year and a half later, had changed his life. He wasn’t moping constantly anymore; during the day he worked in an office answering phones, and every evening he was either practicing or fucking around with his friends. He still hung out with his pre-injury friends, but his life now revolved around the disabled community, going on outings with other challenged athletes. Weekends were almost always spent at races, either casual ones between team members or larger ones throughout New Zealand and even internationally. He didn’t need a live-in aide, so Frank had moved on and Chris had come to work with him. Chris arrived in the morning to help him get ready for work, and met him at practice to help him there and then take him home to get him in bed.

He worked hard every day with two goals: to live as independently as possible, and to one day be a Paralympian. He had watched more and more videos of the Paralympics, and had followed the London games religiously; he knew his exact category and his best events, and all he wanted was to go to Rio.

The happiest moment of his life to date was when New Zealand Paralympics announced its track and field team for 2016, including one Dean Lance O’Gorman.


	2. Aidan

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And now we have Aidan! Next will probably be Richard, as I've started his, but it might take longer. Again, as a person who wasn't born disabled, it's a lot harder for me to figure out what life is like for people who are born with their disabilities, as opposed to getting them later in life.

It started with a couple of cuts, on his shins. They weren’t horrible, huge gashes, so his mother gently washed them with some water. At four years old--just one month away from five--Aidan had gotten into scrapes before. It wasn’t really a big deal, and he kept right on playing.

His legs hurt a lot after the cuts. The skin wasn’t healing, and his legs looked pretty funny to him--not silly funny, like the kind that made him laugh, but weird funny, with gross stuff around the cuts. He didn’t really pay them much mind, though, and since he insisted on dressing himself, his parents didn’t see them for a while. He knew something was wrong when his father got that frowny face and told him to get in the car. They ended up at the hospital, where he was poked at by a lot of doctors. He didn’t like being poked, and his legs hurt.

“Aidan?” said his doctor, a smiley man who said to call him Kevin. He wasn’t very smiley anymore, though. “I’m going to tell you something, and it’s pretty scary, but your parents are right here. Your cuts got an infection. It’s a bad infection, and we can’t give you medicine to make you better.”

“What’s a ‘fection?” Aidan interrupted loudly, squirming around on the hospital bed, which was way bigger than he was.

“An infection is when something bad gets inside you,” Kevin explained patiently. Years later, Aidan would come to understand that his infection had led to blood poisoning in both of his legs, but at the time he just figured it came from maybe a spider or something else creepy that crawled into his legs at night. “If we don’t do anything, the infection would go into the rest of your body, and that would be very bad.” At this point, Kevin nodded towards Aidan’s parents, giving them their cue to explain the situation.

“Sweetie,” his mother began, her eyes filled with tears. She tried to keep her voice steady and comforting. “If the doctors don’t do anything, you could die.”

“Like Joey’s ma?” Aidan asked, not liking the sound of that.

“Yes, like Joey’s ma,” his mother affirmed. “That would be bad, so the doctors are going to do something that will be scary at first, but it means you’ll be here to grow up. They need to cut off your legs.”

Aidan burst into frightened tears. “I don’t want to!” he screamed, already terrified of the thought of doctors coming at him with scissors to cut his legs off like he cut up paper for art projects at Sunday school. “Mummy, please,” he begged, looking to his parents for help. How could they let the doctors do this to him? Didn’t they love him enough?

“We know it’s scary, Aidan,” his father said quietly, making the tiny boy on the bed quiet down to listen. “There isn’t another choice. If we don’t let the doctors do this for you, it means you could get very sick and die. Please, Aid, please understand we love you and we just want you to be okay.”

While Aidan was distracted by his parents, a nurse carefully injected anesthesia into the little boy’s IV line, and he soon fell asleep on the bed.

* * *

When he woke up, Aidan was confused. He tried to sit up in bed, but he was having a lot of trouble. He looked down to see what was hurting so much and began to cry again.

Wrapped up in bandages, his legs ended before the knee.

* * *

He started out in a wheelchair. His first one was the kind he had in the hospital, which wasn’t very comfortable and had handles so people could push him around. He didn’t like it when people pushed him around. Once he was allowed to go home, his legs healed, he preferred to scoot himself around the floor with his hands, so nobody could push him in his wheelchair without him asking.

One day, his father sat down on the floor next to him, holding a catalogue. “Aidan, do you want to pick a color?” he asked, showing him a page full of bright colors.

“What’s it for?” he asked excitedly, looking at all the options.

“Remember how the doctors measured all those things about you? You’re going to get a new wheelchair that you can push all by yourself, and nobody will push you around in it.”

Aidan bounced happily at the thought. If he had a wheelchair that he could use all by himself, he could play with his friends again, and go to school in the fall. He was, after all, five now. “I want that one,” he announced, pointing at a royal blue on the page. “Do I really get a blue one?” he asked, amazed. The one he had after the hospital was all boring, with a black seat and plain silver metal. A blue one would be very cool.

“Of course you do.”

* * *

When he was fourteen, Aidan had a jet-black wheelchair (and no, his mother was wrong, he wasn’t in some emo phase) and was dying to play sports. All of the guys at school played sports, and he was sick of being different. He was already the only one in school in a wheelchair, and everyone stared at him no matter where he went. He felt that he deserved to play sports by now.  It was a thing all the guys did; he was the only boy his age he knew that had never even tried a sport at one time or another. He just wanted to know what it was like; he wasn’t planning to get really into it, he simply wanted to try. When he found a magazine with pictures from the Paralympics, Aidan bought it without a second life and took it home to page through.

Practically his whole life had been spent in his wheelchair. He vaguely remembered walking, but he had been so young when he lost his legs that those memories were brief and didn’t feel very real. It wasn’t that he minded the chair; on the contrary, when given the option of prosthetic legs, he had politely refused. He liked his chair, was fast in it, and didn’t see any reason to have fake legs; he was pretty sure they would slow him down. Now, however, as he looked at pictures of Paralympic athletes in his magazine, he sort of wished he had gotten them. People ran on prosthetics, but he couldn’t run.

When he turned the page of the magazine, and saw a picture of the US wheelchair rugby team after winning the world championships, his whole world changed. After one day of practice with a team in Dublin, he stopped feeling sorry for himself for not having prosthetics. After a month, he was positive that he was sticking with sport instead of just trying it. And then, after years of hard work, he was on a plane to Rio, grinning in nervous excitement as he talked to his teammates.


	3. Richard

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As you can see in this chapter, I basically fucked around ages so they are all supposed to be in their twenties and thirties, which is a more realistic age for Paralympic competition.

Her baby was so tiny. She had only been able to hold him briefly before they had to take him to do all the necessary tests, but she had named him Richard and was unable to rest and relax, even though labor had exhausted her beyond belief, because all she wanted was that little boy back in her arms.

“Mrs. Armitage?” a voice asked. It was her doctor, a nice woman named Dr. Kim, but she wasn’t smiling. “Richard has a strong heart and good lungs and he’s a great weight, but we need to talk to you a little. He doesn’t respond to movement or even bright lights, and his eyes are all white. He’s completely blind.”

“He… he’s okay other than that?” she asked slowly, too tired to really process what was happening. Later, she would cry into Richard’s wispy hair and into her husband’s chest, wondering if she had somehow caused this by eating the wrong thing or doing something too stressful for her body while she was pregnant, but at that point the only thing she wanted were the facts.

Dr. Kim nodded. “Other than that, he’s pretty much perfect. Would you like to hold him again?” A nurse appeared next to the bed, holding her son.

“Yes,” she whispered, taking the tiny bundle of blankets with just a face peeking out. “Hi, Richard,” she cooed, determined not to be upset over one tiny thing that wasn’t right with her son. “You’re such a beautiful little boy already,” she added, and she carefully pulled one of his hands out to touch her face. “Feel this? I’m your mummy, and that’s my face.”

* * *

Richard was six, and they were going to France with his aunt and uncle for a holiday. He thought it was nice that they got to go on holiday, but he was a little scared about the whole flying thing. Well, actually, flying didn’t sound that bad, but he already disliked the airport. Heathrow was terribly, almost painfully,  _loud_ . He didn’t like loud, because it got all confusing trying to hear the little things around him. Instead of getting to wander around independently like he could at home and at school, his mother had his left hand clutched tightly in her own.

His right hand tapped his cane in front of him, more out of habit than necessity. After all, his mother was steering him. He liked having his cane, though. It made him feel more grown up that he _could_ go off on his own, even if he wasn’t allowed to while in the airport, and his father had explained that when people saw it, they knew he was blind and would move out of his way. Richard liked to pretend sometimes that he was a king, knowing how people got out of his way. People always cleared the way for kings in storybooks.

He stumbled a little when he slowed down to imagine this but his mother kept right on going. “Richard,” she chastised, pulling his arm gently to get him going again. “Keep up, we need to get to our gate or we’ll miss our flight.”

Richard hurried up, not wanting to miss the flight and not get to go on holiday, leaving the imaginings of being a king for another time.

* * *

To be perfectly honest, Richard didn’t exactly want to play intramural sports. At twelve, he liked listening to books on tape, and sports would take time and then he wouldn’t finish  _Lord of the Rings_ for ages. He was just starting the  _Two Towers_ and wasn’t happy that his Tolkien time was being interrupted. His parents had insisted he “just try it” and he had reluctantly agreed. On Tuesday afternoon, he stayed at school after classes finished and went over to the gym. His school was for kids who were deaf or blind, and while the deaf kids could play any sport they wanted, Richard’s options were more limited. He could swim, run, try judo, or play goalball. He picked goalball because he had never heard of it, and he didn’t like the sounds of the other ones. He showed up in the gym in a t-shirt and shorts, and sat down on the floor when asked to by a coach.

After two hours of learning the rules and trying to play a little, Richard thought he could do this. It was only two days a week, and it was pretty cool. Two days a week would leave plenty of time for his other hobbies, and he was sure his parents would be happy that he had found a sport he liked well enough.

He wasn’t quite sure how, within a couple years, he ended up practicing five days a week and going to the gym on Saturdays to exercise more, but somehow it happened. The upper school team practiced more, and he was on the varsity team, so they had to practice a lot. It wasn’t a big deal, really; he still finished _Lord of the Rings_ pretty quickly, and had moved on to the _Silmarillion_ to put in his Walkman as they took their team bus to a big game.

When he was in his early thirties, he had gone to international competitions as a part of Team GB twice, and Rio was drawing near. It was something he wanted so badly he was scared to talk about it, because he didn’t want to mention it in case he couldn’t go. When he was named to the team, he didn’t pack up his bags until the day before his flight, so worried that he was going to get a call within the week leading up that would tell him that they had found someone better and he was off the team. That didn’t happen, though, and he was soon flying over the ocean, listening to _Return of the King_ on his iPod, just for old time’s sake.


	4. Adam

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had trouble figuring out who to write next (as I previous said when I started this, I don't know much about the experience of being born disabled) but heyo, here's Adam's story of getting to the Paralympics!

Adam’s legs were only a little different at birth; the doctors told his parents to keep an eye on it, but that this could, and often did, resolve itself in childhood. The difference remained, though, and got a little more pronounced as Adam grew up. The turning point, however, that took him from thick inserts in his right shoe to specially made shoes that added an extra six inches to the right side, was puberty. The growth plate on the right leg just… didn’t work. By the time he went to university, Adam had adjusted. He had learned to hem so that he could fix his own trouser legs to fit him properly, and he could almost keep up with his able-bodied friends without asking them to slow down.

Sports were the one thing that had evaded Adam for his whole life. Even with just a couple inches difference between his legs, he hadn’t been able to keep up with his able-bodied peers. He could swim well enough to mess around in the pool or save himself from drowning, but he couldn’t go fast enough to compete. His running felt like an embarrassment from the time he was able to play tag against his cousins: he was the first tagged, and was “it” until one of the adults pulled a child aside and made them let Adam tag them. Despite being a child, he had known what was going on, and he hadn’t liked it. As many sports--football, cricket, basketball, rugby, and almost everything else--involved running, he stayed far away from any athletic pitch. He got stared at enough, and he didn’t want to give anyone any more reason to do so.

It was his second year of uni when he answered a knock on his door to find his friend Alex outside, looking excited. “What’s up?” he asked, stepping aside to let the other man in.

“Are you busy?” Alex asked, practically bobbing up and down on his toes. When Adam shook his head, he grinned wildly. “Right, put on a t-shirt and some shorts and grab your trainers, because we’re going to the track.”

“The track?” Adam repeated, raising an eyebrow. “Man, that is a mean joke.”

Alex rolled his eyes. “I’m not joking! There is a clinic there that the UK Paralympic track and field team is putting on, and you’re going. I decided for you. Come on, it starts in half and hour and it takes a long time to get down there. I know you said you hate sports or whatever, but this is against other people with disabilities. The reason sports sucked is because everyone you played against was able-bodied and that made it impossible to be a fair competition. Come on, Adam, this is a chance to try. It’s free, and they give you lunch. Why wouldn’t you go? Now put on some damn sports clothes and let’s go.”

Feeling unable to say no, and secretly not wanting to, Adam changed his clothes and followed Alex out of the room and the building and across campus to the indoor track. At the clinic, he stayed toward the back, looking at everyone else. There were wheelchair users and people who walked, but nobody had legs like his. He felt sort of defeated by that. They separated into four groups: wheelchair using children, wheelchair using adults, ambulatory children, and ambulatory adults. There were four other ambulatory adults, and Adam started out with them in the field events. One man in his group had a single foot amputation and the other three, all women, had varying degrees of cerebral palsy. Adam felt self-conscious, even surrounded by other disabled people. Except on internet support groups, he had never met someone with a leg length difference, and apparently this clinic would be no different. He threw shot put, javelin, and discuss, but he wasn’t great, and nor was he having fun. After an hour of trying throwing, he wanted to go back to his apartment and play video games, but Alex found him and made him stay. They ate a quick lunch before Adam began the track lesson as Alex watched from the bleachers a few meters away.

“We’re going to warm up with a few drills,” the teacher explained. She was a tall woman with mild cerebral palsy, named Evangeline, and Adam wasn’t sure how much she could help him. He was going to do it, though, because Alex was trying to help him and he only had to suffer through an hour of this. He struggled but completed the weird “grapevine” thing, and wove through cones like he was supposed to, but it wasn’t exactly fun.

After the drills, Evangeline had them sprint, one at a time. The idea, she explained, was not to compete against each other, as they had different disabilities and levels of leg function, but to challenge themselves. Adam hung out in the back of the group, but after everyone else had gone, he was up, because Evangeline wouldn’t take no for an answer. “Adam,” she said softly. “There’s no pressure. Is it your first time running?”

He nodded. “I mean, I ran around a bit as a kid, but I sucked, and my leg length difference has increased a lot since then,” he explained. “I mean, I don’t even know what to do, and everyone else was doing so well at the drills…”

“They all mentioned previous running experience, and they have different disabilities. Hell, you won’t know if you’re any good unless you try. Running even a little helps pick up girls.”

“Not really my area,” Adam muttered under his breath, but he stepped up to the starting line that had been set up. It wasn’t necessarily a desire to run, but a desire to stop having an embarrassing conversation about his sports-based self-esteem problems. He took a deep breath and pushed off on his longer leg, going as fast as he could. Just because he thought he would be bad at it didn’t mean he wanted to half ass it in front of a bunch of people, especially not Alex, who had genuinely wanted to help him by bringing him to this event.

His legs pumped hard as he adjusted his walking gait to work for running, his breath coming in pants due to unfamiliarity with sprinting. He let himself slow to a stop as he crossed the finish line and looked back at Evangeline for feedback. “Told you,” he said with a self-depreciating smile. “Running is not my strong suit.”

“Holy crap,” came a voice to the side, and Adam turned to see one of the women from his group--he thought her name was Liv, but he wasn’t sure--staring. “You haven’t run before? Seriously?”

Adam shifted his weight to his longer leg uncomfortably. “Yeah. I know I’m not like you guys, but was I that bad?”

“You were fast as hell,” Liv said, still sounding a little in awe. “Like, faster than all of us and we have all tried running before.”

Evangeline suddenly appeared at his shoulder, a middle-aged woman behind her. “Adam, this is one of our Paralympic coaches,” she explained. “Cate, you need to watch this guy. He’s never run before, and he just tore up the track. Could you do another sprint for us, please?”

In all honesty, Adam was too confused to process anything, and just did another sprint to avoid thinking. What were they all on about? He ducked his head down as he ran, pushing his legs even harder because people seemed impressed and he wanted to keep it that way; he had never really physically impressed people in any way, except when he did well in PT. When he crossed the finish line, he looked up and saw Cate holding a stopwatch and looking at him closely.

“I’d like your email, Adam,” she said softly, holding out a clipboard. “And your phone number. We’re going to contact you about training, and maybe coming out to the Olympic and Paralympic Training Center for a week. You show a lot of promise.”

“What?”

“Dude, you just kicked ass,” the foot amputee guy, who might have been named Dominic or something, explained to him. “She wants to train you for the national team.”

Two years later, Alex hugged him before he got on the plane. “I’ll see you in Rio in a few weeks,” he told his friend, impressed at the red, white, and blue outfit of the Great Britain Paralympic team.

“Thanks,” Adam replied.

“What?”

“For making me go to that clinic. You changed my life.” Adam rolled his eyes. “That was sappy. You’re a stupid wanker, and I’ll see you in a couple weeks.” He smiled before he turned away from his friend and boarded the plane with his teammates, selecting a seat next to a goalball player he was friends with. “Ready for this shit, Richard?”


End file.
